Billie Lourd pens emotional tribute to mom Carrie Fisher on what would've been her 68th birthday
"Sixty is too damn young to die."
Billie Lourd's grief doesn't get any easier.
Nearly eight years after her mother, Carrie Fisher, died at 60, Lourd is paying loving tribute on Oct. 21 — what would have been the Star Wars actress' 68th birthday.
"On my mom's birthday every year, I try to celebrate her as much as possible, but today I really wanted to celebrate her with her," Lourd captioned a photo of the two, who appeared to be at a restaurant, where Fisher was blowing out candles on a cake. "Some years my grief makes me feel the warmth of her love, some years it makes me angry, some years I feel numb but today when I woke up I just felt sad. I didn't want to celebrate, I just wanted my mom. "
Lourd said in her statement that she had Googled the average death of a woman, and she'd learned that it was 80.2 years.
"My mom died when she was 60. 60 is too damn young to die," The Last Showgirl actress wrote. "I then googled drug overdose deaths (another fun morning google!!!) and it is over 100 thousand people per year. I did everything in my power to help my mom get sober but sadly my mom couldn't ever escape her addiction."
Fisher died after suffering a heart attack during a flight from London to Los Angeles. The death of the When Harry Met Sally actress was caused by sleep apnea and other undetermined factors, the Los Angeles County Coroner reported, per PEOPLE. The coroner noted that Fisher had struggled with atherosclerotic heart disease and drug use, the latter of which she had wrestled with publicly for years. A toxicology report identified multiple substances, including cocaine and opiates, in her body when she died.
In her birthday remarks, Lourd said Fisher, who wrote about her struggle in projects such as Postcards from the Edge, had tried to help people with a similar issue.
"But while she was alive she always shared the ups and downs of that struggle with others in hopes it would help them escape their own addiction," Lourd wrote. "As an addict, being open about the struggle is the only way through. And same goes for those of us affected by that struggle. Sending my love to anyone out there who has lost someone to drug addiction. You are not alone."
Related: Billie Lourd and Mark Hamill honor 'our princess' Carrie Fisher at Walk of Fame ceremony
Lourd regularly remembers her mom on her birthday. In 2019, she sang a cover of Fisher's favorite song, "American Girl" by the late Tom Petty.
"Not that I'm some kind of grief expert by any means, but on milestones (or whatever you want to call them) like this, I like to celebrate her by doing things that she loved to do," she wrote then, adding that she would probably have "a pint of vanilla Haggen Dazs and a Coca Cola for dinner."
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